Regrets
by No Time To Cry
Summary: Shizuru regrets not having realized what was happening sooner. She was a child, yes, but she still thinks that she could have done better. That she has failed her baby brother. Shizuru is full of regrets. But this isn't one of them.


A/N: I have re-discovered my love for this series and have decided to actively write for it. This, of course, is just me testing the waters for the fandom. Figuring out what people like, what I like, and how to mesh the two together. So, please, feedback is loved!

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><p>When Shizuru was five years old, she was told that she would be a big sister. It was the biggest thing that had ever happened in her young life. She thought it was the best thing that would ever happen to her. And she promised her mother that she would take good care of her new sibling and teach him all sorts of things, that she would be the best older sister in the whole world. And Ayami smiled at her and said that she knew Shizuru would be.<p>

When Shizuru was almost six, her parents brought Kazuma home from the hospital. For a time, she lived up to her words. When Ayami was sleeping or Mamoru was at work, she was the one that watched Kazuma. Bathed him, changed him, fed him. When he got older, she taught him everything she knew.

As such, she was the one that first noticed when things started to change.

Shizuru was the first to watch in wonder as her baby brother stared at walls for hours on end, as though he was looking at something that he had never seen before. She was the first to notice how he grew to hate being alone, started to loathe the room that he had always lived, and completely and utterly feared any and every closet in the house. She noticed before any one else that sometimes he would stray to an empty room and just sit there, alone, for minutes on end. Then he would shoot from his seat and scramble out of the room like something was chasing him. Kazuma always ran straight to her when this happened and he wouldn't leave her side until she made him.

From day one, Kazuma was a clumsy child. He was awkwardly built, with long legs and wide eyes, and never went too long without tripping over himself. When he turned three, Shizuru started to realize that often, when he tripped, he would fall in odd ways. Like someone had pushed him.

Often, Shizuru would wake up to her brother screaming. Nightmares, her father would tell her, but her mother would frown and slip from the room wearing a look that scared the young girl.

On the dawn of Kazuma's eighth birthday, Shizuru's father took her on a trip to the park. It was weird, Shizuru can remember thinking, because it was a week day and her father should have been at work. But she was just a child and the prospect of spending extra time with her father shoved all of her worries to the back of her mind.

She knows better now - wishes that she hadn't been so naive, hadn't ignored the way her brother had acted all his life, had argued the point just a little more and insisted that he went with her. But she was only thirteen then, still just a little girl, and her fathers word was law.

They stayed at the park until the sun was setting, turning everything around them shades of red and blue and purple. Mamoru bought her ice-cream on the way home. She was still licking at the cold treat when he opened the door to their house and they walked inside. He turned on the light for the living room and then shouted something, grabbing her arm hard enough that it hurt and pulling her up against him, pressing her face into his stomach. Shizuru struggled. Barely managed to turn her head. Caught a glimpse of a pale form strewn across the floor and firebrand curls standing stark against the white carpet. Then she screamed loud and long and started to cry.

When Shizuru turned fourteen, her father started taking long business trips out of the town. Then out of the country. Trips that sent him to England and America and France. All over the world. He would be gone for months at a time, leaving a list of numbers for her to call if there was an emergency and an envelope of money in the freezer.

When Kazuma turned nine, he came into Shizuru's room late one night with a picture frame clutched in his hands. There was a picture of Ayami in it, smiling a perfect smile and looking out with at everyone with sky blue eyes. He asked her who it was - then he confessed that he doesn't remember much of anything that happened when he was younger, not even the voice of his own mother.

That was the day that Shizuru realized she had broken her promise to her mother almost a year ago. Something had hurt her baby brother, and at the time she didn't know what.

The very next time that her father came home, Shizuru insisted that he tell her what happened the day he took her to the park. It was surprisingly easy to break his resolve and the anger he felt towards his son was more than apparent. Mamoru blamed Kazuma for Ayami death.

So Shizuru stepped up her game and took on the role of sister, mother, and father. She became the only person that the young Kazuma trusted.

On the day that Kazuma turned ten, Shizuru noticed that he was starting to stare at the walls again. So she called him into the kitchen, had him blow out the candles on his cake, and as she cut it she told him everything.

Kazuma didn't cry. Now, that realization scares Shizuru. Back then, it made her happy. She didn't like dealing with Kazuma when he cried.

As Kazuma got older, Shizuru taught him to defend himself. Taught him to fight back, but only when he really needed to. She didn't teach him not to hit a girl, not to fight someone weaker then he was, or to always keep his word. Kazuma just did it on his own.

A code of honor, he called it, and he said it came to him in a dream. That someone with pitch black eyes and long crimson hair told him about it. Made him swear to always live by it. Kazuma has never been able to tell her whether this person was male or female.

By thirteen, Kazuma was starting to form a group of close-knit friends. They were all boys that he had pulled from the cracks of the city, rescuing them from themselves and from others. He called them his gang and he taught them the same code that he lived by.

He would die to protect them, Kazuma told Shizuru one day, because he considered them to be family. And that, evidently, was what he thought you did for family.

Kazuma was fourteen the day he came home with a broken nose, two black eyes, a trail of crusted blood running down his chin. She never told him this, but it scared Shizuru to death seeing him there. Then she caught sight of him smiling.

Said a boy named Yusuke Urameshi tried to beat up Kiroshima*. Kazuma didn't even land a punch on the other boy when he took over the fight. What he didn't say, and this is something that Shizuru will not find out for years to come, is that the creature with the black eyes and the hair like flames came to him the next day. Told him to follow his instincts and to live the life he was meant to.

Kazuma started picking fights with Yusuke every chance he got after that. But, for everything else, he stuck to his code of honor.

When Yusuke died the first time, Shizuru thought at first that it was one of his 'gang' that had been hit by the car. Not some boy who always beat him fist-fights.

When Kazuma told her that Yusuke had come back to life, that he could do things with that abundant amount of energy he always had, and that he was going to start helping Yusuke out on missions where he would fight against real life demons, Shizuru felt that she had failed Ayami once again.

It isn't until today, on her baby brothers seventeenth birthday, with a house full of demons and a single reaper-girl that Shizuru finally realizes she hadn't failed Kazuma.

This realization comes to her in the form a tall person with eyes the same color as the night sky and hair the exact same shade of her brothers. The person, she cannot tell if it is male or female, is standing in the corner of her house while Kazuma and Yusuke trade jokes. She stares at it until black eyes meet her own brown ones - and then it lifts a single finger and hold it to its lips, nods at her and waves an elegant hand in Kazuma's direction, and then vanishes into nothing.

Shizuru still regrets not realizing what her mother had been planning on doing to Kazuma or even noticing that something just wasn't right with her baby brother. But she knows she never failed him, not once. Knows this because the creature with the firebrand hair told her so.

And, for some reason, she believes it.


End file.
